The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical

Edited by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin

Description

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Misérables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical

Edited by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin

Table of Contents

Introduction I. Britannia Rules: the Early British Musical and Society Chapter 1. Ballad Opera: Commercial Song in Enlightenment Garb Berta Joncus Chapter 2. Between Opera and Musical: Theatre Music in Early Nineteenth-Century London Christina Fuhrmann Chapter 3. Comic Opera: English Society in Gilbert and Sullivan Carolyn Williams Chapter 4. English Musical Comedy, 1890-1924 Stephen Banfield Chapter 5. English West End Revue: World War I and after David Linton II. British or American: Artistic Differences Chapter 6. Musical Comedy in the 1920s and 1930s: Mr. Cinders and Me and My Girl as Class- Conscious Carnival George Burrows Chapter 7. West End Royalty: Ivor Novello and English Operetta, 1917-1951 Stewart Nicholls Chapter 8. The American Invasion: the Impact of Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun Dominic Symonds Chapter 9. "Ordinary People" and British Musicals of the Post-War Decade John Snelson III. New Approaches to Form and Subject Matter Chapter 10. After Anger: the British Musical of the late 1950s Elizabeth Wells Chapter 11. "I'm Common and I Like 'Em": Representations of Class in the Period Musical after Oliver! Ben Francis Chapter 12. Towards a British Concept Musical: the Shows of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse David Cottis Chapter 13. The Pop Music Industry and the British musical Ian Sapiro IV. "The British Are Coming!" Chapter 14. "Everybody's Free to Fail": Subsidized British Revivals of the American Canon Sarah Browne Chapter 15. Les Misérables: from Epic Novel to Epic Musical Kathryn M. Grossman and Bradley Stephens Chapter 16. "Humming the Sets": Scenography and the Spectacular Musical from Cats to The Lord of the Rings Christine White Chapter 17. Billy Elliot and Its Lineage: the Politics of Class and Sexual Identity in British Musicals since 1953 Robert Gordon V. Trailblazers Chapter 18. Noel Coward: Sui Generis Dominic McHugh Chapter 19. Joan Littlewood: Collaboration and Vision Ben Macpherson Chapter 20. Lionel Bart: British Vernacular Musical Theatre Millie Taylor Chapter 21. Tim Rice: the Pop Star Scenario Olaf Jubin Chapter 22. Cameron Mackintosh: Control, Collaboration and the Creative Producer Miranda Lunskaer-Nielsen Chapter 23. Andrew Lloyd Webber: Haunted by the Phantom David Chandler VI. "The Art of the Possible": Alternative Approaches to Musical Theatre Aesthetics Chapter 24. The Beggar's Legacy: Playing with Music and Drama, 1920-2003 Bob Lawson-Peebles Chapter 25. Mamma Mia! and the Aesthetics of the 21st Century Jukebox Musical George Rodosthenous Chapter 26. Attracting the Family Market: Shows with Cross-generations Appeal Rebecca Warner Chapter 27. Genre Counterpoints: Challenges to the Mainstream Musical David Roesner Chapter 28. Some Yesterdays Always Remain: Black British and Anglo-Asian Musical Theatre Ben Macpherson

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical

Edited by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin

Author Information

Edited by Robert Gordon, Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths University, and Olaf Jubin, Instructor in Media Studies and Musical Theatre, Regents College

As Professor of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, Robert Gordon established the first MA in Musical Theatre for writers and producers in Europe. He has worked as a playwright, director, actor and critic and is author of Pinter's Theatre of Power, Stoppard: Text and Performance, The Purpose of Playing, co-author of British Musicals since 1950 and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies. Olaf Jubin is Reader in Media Studies and Musical Theatre at Regent's University London; he has written, co-written and co-edited several books in the area of popular culture, the mass media and musical theatre, both in English and in German, among them studies on the dubbing and subtitling of Hollywood musicals for the German market and a comparative analysis of American, British, German and Austrian reviews of the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Contributors:

Stephen Banfield is professor emeritus of music at the University of Bristol. He is the author of books on Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Kern, the English composer Gerald Finzi and the English art song as an early 20th-century genre. He edited the 20th-century volume of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain and is currently working on two social histories of music, in the west country of England and the British Empire.

Sarah Browne is Head of Music and Principal Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton. She is also course leader for musical theatre. She has worked extensively as conductor, arranger and musical director. Her research interests include the politics of race and gender in musical theatre, American musical theatre of the 1960s and stage to screen transitions of musicals. Her work includes a number of papers on the musical, Hair, and the male gaze in film musicals. Sarah is currently completing a PhD at the University of Winchester, analysing the performance of rebellion in the musical, Hair.

Dr. George Burrows is Principal Lecturer in Performing Arts at the University of Portsmouth. He is co-founder of the Song, Stage and Screen international conference and founding editor of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre (Intellect). Although a critical musicologist by training, his research is generally interdisciplinary in approach and has a focus on musical theatre and jazz of the interwar period. His publications include the first edition of the Cello Concerto by Charles Villiers Stanford and journal articles on the likes of Duke Ellington and Cole Porter. George is completing a forthcoming monograph for Oxford University Press entitled Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. This first complete survey of the recordings by the Kansas-City based swing band, explores issues of race, gender, sexuality and commerce that were bound up with interwar recording culture. George is also the director of the Portsmouth University choir, which he has conducted for more than a decade in concerts in Britain and overseas.

David Cottis is a writer, director and lecturer. He is the Artistic Director of the award-winning Instant Classics Theatre Company, and has taught at Mountview Theatre Academy and the Universities of East Anglia, Northampton, East London and Middlesex. His adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist was toured nationally by the Love and Madness Theatre Company.

David Chandler is a professor in the English Department at Doshisha University, Kyoto. His background is in English Romanticism, but in recent years he has worked mainly on opera and musical theatre, editing books on Alfredo Catalani and Italo Montemezzi and writing pioneering articles on Roger Waters, Edward Cympson, Alan Doggett, nineteenth-century musical adaptations of Charles Dickens's stories, and other topics. He is currently working on a critical biography of Montemezzi and a history of The Lion King. He is a regular reviewer for Opera, Opera Today and Musicweb International.

Ben Francis is completing a PhD on Stephen Sondheim at Goldsmiths University. He has contributed essays to The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies and has written Christopher Hampton: Dramatic Ironist (Amber Lane Press.) He was also a regular writer for the Radio 2 comedy show The News Huddlines starring Roy Hudd.

Christina Fuhrmann received her Ph.D. in musicology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2001. She is a Professor in the Department of Music at Ashland University, where she received the 2015 Taylor Excellence in Teaching Award. Her publications include articles in Nineteenth-Century Music Review and Gender, Sexuality and Early Music, and a volume on Romanticism and opera. Her critical edition of Henry Bishop's adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro was published in 2012 by A-R Editions and her book Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: from Mozart to Bellini is forthcoming in 2015 from Cambridge University Press.

Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of the Pinter Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he established the first MA in Musical Theatre for writers and producers in Europe. His publications include The Purpose of Playing (2006), Pinter's Theatre of Power (2012), and The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies (2014). An actor, director and playwright who has worked in South Africa, Ireland, USA, Italy, Czech Republic, and the UK, he has recently completed the book for a children's musical and is co-author of British Musical Theatre since 1950 (forthcoming, Bloomsbury 2016).

Kathryn M. Grossman is Professor of French at Pennsylvania State University. Her research centers on nineteenth-century French literature, especially Victor Hugo's novels and other visionary prose fiction. She is the author of two books on Les Misérables - Les Misérables: Conversion, Redemption, Revolution (Twayne Publishers-Macmillan, 1996) and Figuring Transcendence in Les Misérables: Hugo's Romantic Sublime (Southern Illinois University Press, 1994) - as well as two further studies of Hugo's early prose fiction (Droz, 1986) and his later novels (Oxford University Press, 2012). With Bradley Stephens, she has recently co-edited Les Misérables and its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage, and Screen (Ashgate, 2015).

Dr. Berta Joncus is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on performers, eighteenth-century music and celebrity culture. Besides scholarly articles, her major outputs include an edited book on John Rich, the founder of Covent Garden, and the electronic resource Ballad Operas Online (Oxford Digital Library). She is senior editor of the opera Love in a Village (1762) a hybrid hard-copy and online music volume to be issued by Bärenreiter and the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. Berta is also a music critic, principally for the BBC.

Dr. Olaf Jubin is Reader in Media Studies and Musical Theatre at Regent's University London and Associate Lecturer on the MA in Musical Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London. He gained his PhD from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany and has written and co-edited several books on the mass media and musical theatre, including a study of the German dubbing and subtitling of Hollywood musicals and a comparative analysis of reviews of the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Among his forthcoming publications as author and co-author are essays on Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The White Horse Inn as well as the book British Musical Theatre since 1950 (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Robert Lawson-Peebles worked at the Universities of Oxford, Princeton, Aberdeen, and finally Exeter. He has been, amongst others, a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. He has published three books on the cultural history of the American environment, a history of earlier American Literature, and articles on subjects ranging from Sir Walter Ralegh to film versions of "classic" novels. He has a lifelong interest in American music. He edited Approaches to the American Musical (1996), contributed to The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies (2012), and has written essays on the cultural impact of jazz in Britain.

David Linton is a performer/theatre practitioner and lecturer in Drama at Kingston University, London. He co-founded Prussia Lane Productions, a co-operative of performers, writers, filmmakers, designers, and dancers critically engaged in the exploration of interdisciplinary approaches in the creation and realization of performance projects. His research interests include participatory arts, pre-modern multidisciplinary popular theatre forms and their contemporary applications specifically mask/minstrelsy, pantomime, burlesque/ neo burlesque, cabaret, pierrot, hip hop theatre and revue.

Dr. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Bath Spa University where she teaches Musical Theatre and American Drama. She has previously worked with the New York Musical Theatre Festival, Mercury Musical Developments (UK) and as a script reader for Broadway and Off-Broadway producers. Publications include Directors and the New Musical Drama (Palgrave Macmillan) as well as chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies, the Cambridge Companion to the Musical and articles on contemporary British musicals in Studies in Musical Theatre.

Ben Macpherson is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in musical theatre at the University of Portsmouth. His research primarily concerns two areas: philosophies of vocal performance, and the British musical, often exploring the intersection between them. As co-founder of Centre for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, he co-edited Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (Routledge 2015), and acts as co-editor for Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Intellect) and the Routledge Voice Studies series. A founding member of the British Musical Theatre Research Institute, he is currently working on a monograph exploring imperialism and identity in British musical theatre, 1890-1939 (Palgrave).

Dominic McHugh is Lecturer in Musicology and Director of Performance at the University of Sheffield. His many publications include the books Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (OUP, 2012) and Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist's Letters(OUP, 2014); chapters in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture and The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers; and articles in Journal of the American Musicological Society and The Wagner Journal. He has appeared numerous times on BBC radio and television and has regularly acted as a consultant or guest speaker for Christie's, Lost Musicals, Encores! and the V&A.Stewart Nicholls is a director/choreographer, writer and lecturer. He is also the archivist for David Heneker, Julian Slade as well as George Posford and has restored and directed/ choreographed many works of British Musical Theatre including Popkiss (Electric Theatre, Guildford, 1997), Sail Away (Rhoda McGaw Theatre, Woking, 1998), A Girl Called Jo, Follow That Girl, Zip Goes A Million, Vanity Fair,Grab Me A Gondola, The Amazons, Ann Veronica (all at staged at Theatre Museum, Covent Garden, London between 2000 and 2005), Gay's The Word (Finborough Theatre, London, 2012 and revived at Jermyn Street Theatre, London 2013), Salad Days, The Biograph Girl (both staged for London College of Music 2013), and Free As Air (Finborough Theatre, London 2014). Many of his productions have been recorded and released on CD while his restoration of Noël Coward's Sail Away is published by Warner/Chappell Music. Stewart also directs/ choreographs new theatre works, revivals, cabarets and pantomime; www.stewartnicholls.co.uk.

George Rodosthenous is Associate Professor in Theatre Directing at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries (University of Leeds). His research interests are the body in performance, refining improvisational techniques and compositional practices for performance, devising pieces with live musical soundscapes as interdisciplinary process, theatre directing, updating Greek Tragedy and the British Musical. He has edited the book Theatre as Voyeurism: the Pleasures of Watching (Palgrave) and he is currently editing Contemporary Approaches to Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions (Methuen Bloomsbury) and The Disney Musical onStage and Screen: Critical Approaches from Snow White to Frozen (Methuen Bloomsbury).

David Roesner is Professor for Theatre and Music Theatre at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität Munich. He specializes in exploring the musicality of theatre and the theatricality of music in historic and contemporary practices. Major recent publications include two edited books on Theatre Noise (CSP 2011, with Lynne Kendrick) and Composed Theatre (Intellect 2012, with Matthias Rebstock) and his new monograph Musicality in Theatre, which was published by Ashgate in July 2014. David also works as a theatre-musician, sound designer and director. Examples of his work and further publications can bee seen at: http://mhn.academia.edu/DavidRoesner.

Ian Sapiro is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds, researching and teaching film music, musical theatre, orchestration and the overlaps between them. He is author of Ilan Eshkeri's Stardust: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow, 2013) and chapters on film-score orchestration for handbooks by Routledge and Palgrave, and is currently writing a monograph on the role of the film-score orchestrator for Routledge, as well as book chapters on screen adaptations of the musicals Les Misérables and Annie. Ian is also co-investigator on the Research Council-funded project The Professional Career and Output of Trevor Jones.

John Snelson is Head of Publishing and Interpretation at the Royal Opera House London. He joined the Royal Opera House as Editor in 2001 and was appointed to his current post in 2006. Snelson studied at the universities of Nottingham, Reading and Birmingham, where he took his PhD. He was a Senior Internal Editor for the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 1994-2000 and has written widely about the lyric stage, including programme articles for many companies and for such publications as Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Cambridge Companion to the Musical, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the Grove Dictionary of American Music. His books include The Ring at Covent Garden for Oberon/ROH and Andrew Lloyd Webber for Yale University Press.

Bradley Stephens is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the reception and adaptation of French Romantic literature and thought. He is the author of numerous studies and articles in this field, including his book Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty (Legenda, 2011) and a new introduction to Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Signet Classics, 2010), and has co-edited several volumes, most recently Les Misérables and its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage,and Screen (Ashgate, 2015) and a forthcoming entry in the MLA's "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" series on Hugo's novel.

Dominic Symonds is Reader in Drama at the University of Lincoln. He is joint editor of Studies in Musical Theatre (Intellect) and founded the international conference Song, Stage and Screen. Publications include We'll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart (OUP), Studying Musical Theatre (Palgrave) (co-written with Millie Taylor), Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance (OUP; co-edited with Millie Taylor) and The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance (Rodopi; co-edited with Pamela Karantonis). His monograph Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song (University of Michigan Press) is forthcoming.

Millie Taylor is Professor of Musical Theatre at the University of Winchester. She worked as a freelance musical director and for almost twenty years toured Britain and Europe with a variety of musicals including West Side Story, The Rocky Horror Show, Little Shop of Horrors and Sweeney Todd. Recent publications include British Pantomime Performance (Intellect 2007), Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (Ashgate, 2012), and with Dominic Symonds Studying Musical Theatre (Palgrave 2014) and the edited collection Gestures of Music Theater: ThePerformativity of Song and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014). She also co-authored British Musicals since 1950 which will be published by Methuen in fall 2016.

Rebecca Warner is a tutor at Urdang Academy and a Visiting Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, and Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked with students at both Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. She studied Music at Cambridge University and Composition for Screen at the Royal College of Music. She is a theatre composer under her maiden name of Rebecca Applin and won the Cameron Mackintosh Resident Composer Scheme in 2015 at the Mercury Theatre Colchester and the New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich.

Elizabeth A. Wells completed her doctorate in musicology at the Eastman School of Music and is now Professor and Pickard-Bell Chair of Music at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. She has won local and regional teaching awards and has presented over 20 papers on pedagogy. Her book on West Side Story was published in 2011 by Scarecrow Press and won the American Musicological Society's Music in American Culture Award. Her work, on American music, British and American musical theatre has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Studies in Musical Theatre.

Professor Christine White started her working career as a stage manager, electrician and lighting designer. She has worked for five UK universities and is currently Head of the School of Art and Design and Assistant Dean for the Faculty of Arts, Design & Technology at the University of Derby. She has published five books exploring theatre devices, the relationship of directors and designers and the different environments for spectating performative events, and the spaces that types of work are played out in. She is founding editor of Scene, an international peer-reviewed journal exploring the contexts and processes of designed environments for theatre, film, television, museums and galleries, interactive and narrative practices.

Carolyn Williams is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, where she recently served as Chair. In addition to articles on Dickens, Eliot, and other Victorian authors and topics, she has published two books, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (2011) and Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism (1989), and has co-edited Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (2002) with Laurel Brake and Lesley Higgins. She is currently writing on Victorian melodrama, under the working title The Aesthetics of Melodramatic Form.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical

Edited by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin

Reviews and Awards

"The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical as a whole represents a highly distinguished level of scholarship and acumen. This is a volume that demonstrates the diversity, inherent social awareness, and musical and dramatic distinctiveness of the British musical. As with other titles in the Oxford Handbook series, one of this volumes goals is to stimulate further inquiries on the topic." - William A. Everett, North American British Music Studies Association